An electric, searing memoir by the original rebel girl and legendary front woman of Bikini Kill
Hey girlfriend? I got a proposition goes something like this: Dare ya to do what you want.
In “Rebel Girl”, Hanna's raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumultuous childhood home to her formative college years in Olympia, Washington, and on to her first years on tour, fighting hard for gigs and for her band. As Hanna makes blindingly clear, being in a “girl band,” especially a punk girl band, in those years was not a simple or safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a band took limitless amounts of grit and bravery.
But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her—including with her bandmates, Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, and Johanna Fateman, her friendships with Kurt Cobain and Ian MacKaye, and her introduction to Joan Jett—and were a testament to how the true punk world nurtured and cared for its own. Hanna opens up about falling in love with Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and her debilitating battle with Lyme disease, and she brings us behind the scenes of her later bands, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement and its decline, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its later exclusivity.
In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the darkest, hardest times along with the most joyful—and how it continues to fuel her revolutionary art and music.
